Wild Country

Chapter Nine

Quantrill handed over his bounty late Sunday night in Junction and slept on a cot in the courthouse annex. It was far from the sleeping arrangements he had intended, and he awoke, Monday morning, with something less than joy. Before drawing his check for hazardous duty he had several things to do.

The most pleasant of those items was breakfast. Then, in descending order, turning in the cycle; filling out forms; and debriefing. In his perverse mood he did them in reverse order — always a mistake.

Marv Stearns eyed the smaller man standing before his desk for debriefing and waved him to a cane-bottomed chair. Stearns had the imposing physique of a defensive end, but these days it was running to meat instead of muscle. His face was more florid than tan. As he spoke, Quantrill listened to the careful diction and wondered, for the umpteenth time, if Steams had spent his college days as an actor instead of an athlete. "If you're going to slouch, Quantrill, I'd rather you sat." He poured himself a fresh cup of coffee, not offering to share it; lined up the notes on his desk with geometric precision; studied the younger man's face with growing satisfaction. Rumbling it in false good humor: "Hung over?"

"Nope; just lack of sleep."

Stearns glanced at his desk terminal. "Maintenance found several empty beer bulbs in your cycle."

Quantrill knew the rules well enough. And, as a lovely assassin had taught him long before, you don't touch alcohol while under heavy stress. He hadn't so much as risked a cold Pearl until after the Rawson encounter. "Picked 'em up for the deposit," he lied. "They'll buy breakfast, if I ever get out of here. Sir."

"I'd have you out of here permanently, if it weren't for your connections," Stearns said. "Where the hell, and why, did you steal that old android?"

A sigh. "Call Mr. Marrow at Wild Country Safari; he'll tell you it was a junker he used for practical jokes. Rawson used it for target practice thinking it was me. And why is maintenance going over my cycle when I haven't turned it in yet?"

"I'll ask the questions," Stearns said, tapping with a forefinger on his desk placard. "Let me make it perfectly clear that I am chief deputy, and I don't like the way you operate. I think you drink on duty. I think you probably goaded Michael Rawson into drawing on you. The first time I catch you in a slip-up, you may end up on a rock-hockey gang at the county farm, or worse. And you're never in uniform, Quantrill. Never!" Stearns fondled the tan silk tie of his own spotless, sleek uniform. "Ties will be worn, mister. No deerskin shirts."

"Regulations permit a certain latitude in the dress code during hazardous duty," Quantrill said, quoting exactly from the book. "That's all you use me for, you know it and I know it. Sir. I could ask why, but you're asking the questions."

Steams bit back a furious reply, took a sip of coffee, and chose to let the harassment lapse for the time being. Most men, knowing they were under constant scrutiny for the slightest infraction, began to make more mistakes from sheer nervousness. Chief Deputy Marvin Stearns liked his world orderly, neat, and predictable. Wild cards like Quantrill were burrs in his personal blanket; he would rather remove them neatly than be surprised by their unconventional ways. Neatness, for Stearns, was a powerful measure of success.

In a trivial bureaucratic way, Stearns was right. But Quantrill had been harassed by experts. No one could have convinced Stearns that he was less than an expert judge of men. Pleased with his strategy. Steams continued the debriefing. He even agreed when, at the end, Quantrill asked to study some files before writing out his final report.

"Go ahead, if it'll make your report sound less like a goddam telegram and more like a professional job." He dismissed Quantrill with a wave.

The little deputy walked out without argument, knowing it was argument that Steams craved. Obvious insubordination or admission of drinking on duty — anything that might give Stearns an excuse for disciplinary action; perhaps even a suspension. Alone, Quantrill studied holo sequences from official files, imprinting the faces and mannerisms of Harley Slaughter and Clyde Longo. He was on his own time now, but those two were free on bail and they might know who had iced Mike Rawson. For some time now, Quantrill had suspected a leak in the Justice Department. If Slaughter and Longo had access to that leak, they might just come calling under false names.

An hour before noon, he cashed his hazardous pay chit and checked the schedules of freighters heading from Junction toward SanTone, then hotfooted it to the pickup point near Interstate 10. With the LOS — line-of-sight — power tower nearby, the huge-wheeled freight rigs often stopped to soak up energy through their antennae. Since the war, a lot of the big rigs were equipped with seats for several paying passengers. It wasn't first-class travel, but if you couldn't afford a hovercycle and couldn't borrow one from the motor pool, a freight rig was the best way to travel through the rough margins of Wild Country.

He found a black double-tandem Peterbilt with a full load revving its flywheels for pullout onto the freeway and waved a five-dollar piece. Headshake. A second coin with the first earned him a wave up, and Quantrill monkey-climbed the steps into the empty compartment behind the driver's.

She was a surly old specimen who took his money and heard his destination with only a nod. Pocketing the coins, she sealed his compartment off, engaged the flywheels, and hauled her freight with nary a word. She didn't need to speak; a sign in American and Spanish informed Quantrill that the passenger compartment was fitted with gas projectors and bulletproof glass "FOR YOUR OWN PROTECTION." In a sense it was true. Few rigs were hijacked when, at the first sign of trouble, a teamster could fill that separated compartment with an assortment of nasty stuff.

Quantrill grinned, seeing the ammo box taped onto the dash near the old girl's short-barreled shotgun. It was illegal for civilians to shoot boosted twelve-gauge single slugs, but not for this leathery old mare to display an empty cartridge box. If you knew anything at all about those low-recoil, rocket-boosted twelve-bores, you knew they'd go right through most bulletproof glass. All in all. he decided, this little old lady made her point eloquently without so much as clearing her throat.

For nearly an hour, Quantrill watched the broken countryside and thought about its future. When he'd first landed that deputy job, freighters carried "bulls" — sharpshooters who literally rode shotgun, or with Heckler & Koch assault rifles, in the cab and inside cargo holds protected by armor. In the past four years, the U. S. marshal's men had ambushed, chased, or simply scared off so many bandits that freighters were no longer easy prey. Citizens in SanTone could once again get fresh grapefruit from the southern valley, fresh beef from Abilene, diesel fuel from Odessa. To some extent, the taming of the freightways had been Quantrill's doing; his and fifty other men's, including Espinel. But Espinel's death proved that life was still cheap in Wild Country. The big landowners often held their spreads with hired guns against squatters. Some of those hired guns worked for little or nothing. Like Rawson and his pals, they needed a base of operations en route between Coahuila and. say. Kansas Ringcity.

How many years before Wild Country could be tamed? With determined law enforcement and honest courts. Quantrill guessed it might be managed in five more years. With things as they were, it might take forever. Especially when too many people moved into the lawless region with high hopes and expensive equipment, but without weapons or ability to defend themselves. Hapless settlers became part of the problem, furnishing easy pickings from Laredo to Yuma. The old issue of gun control was still an issue, despite evidence from towns like Ruidoso and McCook.

Quantrill was fond of Ruidoso, in central New Mexico. It lay in a low mountain range that afforded cover for a robber's route most of the way to the Big Bend region. That being so, a townful of shops and horse race enthusiasts might have seemed a magnet for troublesome brush-poppers. Nearby Cloudcroft had known the nightmare of gun-toting gangs and groups of outlaw hovercyclists. Not Ruidoso!

The township of Ruidoso lived mostly on its horseflesh, one way or another. The town fathers dressed up their horsetown image with frontier celebrations, and they issued fines when they caught a local businessman out of uniform. That uniform ran to Justin boots, rakish Stetsons, jeans with heavy nylon chap panels, and string ties above colorful long-sleeved shirts.

Those jeans didn't really need heavy cartridge belts to hold them up; the belts were for handgun holsters. The postwar city ordinance phrased it as a "compulsory token wearing of sidearms." While urging wearers to peacebond their shootin' irons with ribbon ties to the holsters, nothing was said about ammunition. Roughly once a month, Ruidoso peace officers had to disarm someone. Once a year they had to deal with a shooting. On the one and only occasion when several outlaw cyclists explored Ruidoso together, they soon developed headaches from eyestrain and from frequent darted glances in all directions. They stayed long enough to buy six-packs and aspirin and sought their fun elsewhere. No armed group ever seriously thought about invading Ruidoso. Obviously the town could become noisy, true to its Spanish name, in one hell of a hurry.

McCook, Texas, was a different story; one that Quantrill would never forget. A small town at the southern tip of Texas, McCook leaned on the services of the larger McAllen nearby. McCook's chief of police, wise in the ways of reelection, knew better than to try outlawing personal firearms in his town. With malice toward none, he persuaded most townsfolk to his own version of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment reads: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

The chief, knowing his rhetoric, did not call attention to the final phrase, which, absolutely and positively, guarantees citizens their personal rights to keep and bear arms. Instead, he focused on the words "well-regulated militia." He convinced the good folks of McCook that they would display the perfect model of a well-regulated militia by storing their personal weapons in a city armory. Little McCook even had a few dry runs, hoorawed by local media, in which citizens got in line to receive their pistols, plinking rifles and birdguns long enough to handle and inspect them. McCook's brave experiment, and its holovision coverage, was a published invitation for plunder.

A border bandit named Saltillo assembled two dozen cimarrones and converged on McCook. Some came on horseback, some on hovercycles, and a half-dozen hardcases arrived hidden in a small van that supposedly carried Mexican diesel fuel for legal sale.

Of course, they overran the police station first. The value of the firearms kept there would have paid for the raid. But Saltillo had seen the old silver icons and the jeweled trappings in the church paid for, over the generations, by McCook's devout TexMex Catholics. He figured to hit the bank as well since the church itself would be such a quick knockover.

Saltillo lost one man at the police station but bagged the chief and over a hundred weapons. Cimarrones cleared the streets with rapid volleys and went for the bank next because it happened to be so near the police station. They took forty thousand dollars and three lives there, but they also took their time ransacking the place. Too much time, when the local priest was as thorough and as decisive as Father Quemada.

The good father had heard the worries of his people long before: had agreed to hide the deadly weapons of his parish — or rather, to look the other way when lockers were opened in the church meeting hall. Of McCook's three hundred people, "perhaps thirty ran for the church when the shooting, started. Most of them intended only to pray for salvation.

Saltillo's men held target practice on the stained-glass windows to terrify the priest and his parishioners, then burst in on what they thought would be a huddled mass of victims. Some, in fact, were screaming and praying near the nave when the cimarrones stormed inside.

Saltillo and five of his bravos were shot dead just one pace inside the church by the damnedest concatenation of gunfire imaginable: pellet guns, five handguns, rifles of several calibers, and a sawed-off shotgun firing double-aught buckshot. Father Quemada's combat team was two men, several boys, a half-dozen women, and a pair of teenaged girls. Rumors of a man in black robes firing his own assault rifle were never verified, but it was said later that Father Quemada had the look of a man in need of confession.

Before Saltillo's remaining men fully realized the meaning of this eruption just ahead of them, they were met full face with hot metal blessings from the pure in heart. This was not the kind of greeting the cimarrones had counted on and leaving more of their people flopping in the dust, they lit a shuck for the border.

Three more of Saltillo's men got perforated during the hellish confusion of reversing hovercycles and a van loaded too heavily with stolen guns. By this time McCook's few stubborn Anglos with guns at home got them into play; sniping from cover, shaking with buck fever, steadying down, sniping again.

A few of Saltillo's band got away. McCook got the van and its guns back. Saltillo and the police chief got decent burials. No authority near Wild Country got very far, after that, with schemes for the wholesale removal of personal arms.

Now, Quantrill watched an ancient Volkswagen diesel pickup jounce down a dirt access road near the freeway. He noted and approved of the thick plastic armor bolted to its cab. It obscured part of the windows and it looked like hell, but it said the driver wouldn't be candy in a skirmish. Still, some people came to the region hoping that their claims to government land could be upheld by someone else, without they themselves being ready to operate as a well-regulated family militia. Some of those good people were lucky. Some were driven out by night-riders who may, or may not. have been on payrolls of other ranchers. Some of the newcomers were robbed, raped, tortured, killed by persons unknown.

At least one recent killing bore a clear message. According to a deputy's report, the dead man was found on the spread of a rancher. Perhaps he had been caught rustling a few calves, for he had been treated to an ancient Spanish custom reserved for rustlers: the death of the skins. Apparently while still alive, he was bound inside the fresh "green" hide of a yearling steer and left there without further attention. A pitiless sun, and shrinkage of the hide, had done the rest.

The rancher, old Mulvihill Garner expressed great surprise when the iron-hard hide was found with its grisly contents. The hide bore the Garner brand. Could the old man have done it? Surely not, for old Mul Garner's arthritis kept him off the range. His strapping, hell-raising son, Jerome? But Jer spurned anything that smacked of Spanish influence and lacked his dad's knowledge of the old punishments. Well, somebody had done it, and people tempted to lift Garner sheep or cattle understood the message in the death of the skins.

Quantrill knew Jer Garner slightly, as a little dog knows a big dog. Twice, at weekend dances around Rocksprings, Jer had arranged to jostle Sandy Grange's dance partner. The first time Jer demanded an apology, got it, and decided that Quantrill had-failed a test. The second time had only been for good measure, to remind Sandy who was the biggest bull on the spread.

Ted Quantrill knew better than to misbehave at a public dance: Sandy had to live with folks thereabouts, even if he didn't. With much of Wild Country's control in the hands of ranchers, and with some of them happy to keep it wild, the region partly justified charges by northern critics. Northerners sneered that when you scratched the veneer of the new Southwest, you found the Old West just beneath, now a mix of high tech and whang leather. Some of the finest families in the Southwest kept that reputation going, claiming you could forge a better new world while keeping a bushel of tradition. Folks in the mold of a Kleberg, a Goodnight, or a Dahlman did what they could to maintain the mixture of old and new. And then, of course, there was Quantrill's destination today: the old Schreiner spread, nucleus of Wild Country Safari.